New Essay - "FOSS Licences Wars"

[Shai Berger]

On Sunday 04 October 2009 15:02:23 Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Just one factual correction, if I may.
>
> Shai Berger wrote:
> >  Debian then made a project
> > decision that firmware removal was a "best-effort" only issue.
>
> For Lenny! The decision was that it was too late to get all firmeware
> into non-free for Lenny, so non-free will be tolerated for this one
> release.
>

Well, technically, yes. Except that

A) The title of the chosen option in the vote was "Assume blobs comply with 
GPL unless proven otherwise" (see 
http://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_003#outcome).

B) There were similar decisions made for the two previous releases (Sarge and 
Etch); the vote on Lenny came only after the release managers applied the same 
principle to Lenny with no vote, and people cried foul (searching the list for 
the exact references is beyond me ATM). I think it fair to assume that, when 
confronted with the same dilemma for Squeeze, the Debian project will take a 
similar decision.

Shai.